The UK's spineless universities are all too willing to do the Home Office's bidding

The US has 'santuary campuses', the UK, institutions all too willing to create a hostile environment for migrants. As students, we won't stand for it

The latest round of University and College Union (UCU) strikes have always been about more than pensions and working conditions. They are part of a broader struggle against exploitative conditions in higher education, conditions that disproportionately affect migrant academics, staff and students.

The three rounds of UCU strike action have illuminated the devastating effects of marketisation in UK universities, which have become primarily concerned with shiny new buildings, league table rankings and multi-million-pound marketing campaigns. This new reality is propped up by an exploited academic and student body and a super-exploited underclass of cleaners, caterers and security staff, large proportions of whom are migrants.

Last week, a collective of student activists I am part of, itself part of the Undoing Borders movement, disrupted Universities UK’s (UUK) conference Enhancing the Student Experience. We highlighted UUK’s hypocrisy in claiming to care about students’ experiences, while actively colluding with the Home Office to create a hostile environment for migrant students.

In 2015, the British government accused around 34,000 international students of cheating in English language tests required as part of their visa renewal process. Thousands were expelled from their universities as a result of what was later found to be a false accusation. Many students reported feeling suicidal as a result of the experience. Last year, a report from the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that over 2,000 people had been forcibly removed from the UK as a result of the scandal.

Yet the Home Office also enlists universities in its cruelty. For example, the Home Office demands that universities monitor Tier 4 visa holders (ie migrant students), recording their attendance and retaining copies of their identity documents. Not only this, it requires that they share this data upon request with UK Visas and Immigration.

In the US, a number of universities have nominated their institutions as “sanctuary campuses”, and refuse to comply with raids by the country’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forces. UK universities, on the other hand, have proven entirely willing to comply with the hostile environment. In 2013, the universities of Sunderland and Ulster began forcing international students to give fingerprints to prove their attendance at lectures. In 2018, University College London introduced spot-checks of migrant students’ ID – until the resulting uproar forced them to roll back the policy.

Given this, it is extremely pernicious that higher education often dresses up its complicity with the hostile environment as pastoral support. In 2016, the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA) – a supposed advisory body for migrant students, though part-funded by the Department for Education – produced a guide for universities on their visa monitoring duties. The document outlined practices which in effect would further entrench the hostile environment in universities: specialising university bureaucracy for compliance with the Home Office; training of all staff in immigration control duties; even inspecting students’ attendance patterns in order to discern whether, for example, they might be working without permission. For UKCISA to attend UUK’s conference this year to speak on the importance of “buddy programmes” for international student wellbeing is galling.

Yet it is migrant staff that are at the sharpest end of the hostile environment. In June 2009, cleaners at SOAS who had begun to organise for a living wage were called to an emergency meeting by their employer, the outsourcing company ISS. The meeting was in fact an immigration raid, organised in collaboration with the UK Border Agency. Nine cleaners, one of whom was six months pregnant, were handcuffed, and deported within 24 hours.

It is no surprise, then, that migrants have consistently been on the frontlines of the fight for a liberated higher education sector. Today, migrant academics, staff and students are on picket lines across the UK, while their universities and the Home Office threaten them that strike participation may jeapordise their immigration status. Despite, indeed because of, these threats, they are mobilising.

Migrant workers and students understand most acutely the conditions produced by the increasing precarity of higher education Yet the most vulnerable are always the canaries in the coalmine. What migrants are subject to, we soon will all be. We resist the encroachment of the hostile environment because we know that migrant struggles are inextricable from the struggle for the public university.

Sarah Lasoye is a writer, organiser and postgraduate student at University College London.